TIGERSHARK magazine Issue Sixteen – Winter 2017 – The Mythos Tigershark Magazine Contents Fiction Issue Sixteen – Winter 2017 Mugger (Drabble) The Mythos Denny E. Marshall 3 Visions of the End JH Hook 5 Editorial Dreams of the Yellow King The Cthulhu Mythos. The Yellow Mythos. Myth and Dirk Holland 7 Legend. There are many mythoi and we are investigating the darkest of them all… Sylvia’s Pictures DJ Tyrer 9 The new themes for 2018 are now on the site and there should, soon, be an announcement concerning solo- Help! Someone’s... author projects. DS Davidson 14 Holes in the Northern Ice Contributors are invited to submit a bio for inclusion on the Tigershark website and your comments on the issue Kevin Morley 19 are welcome. News Best, DS Davidson DJ Tyrer 38 The Wall © Tigershark Publishing 2017 Ayd Instone 42 All rights reserved. Authors retain the rights to their individual work. Treat? Editor and Layout: DS Davidson DJ Tyrer 50 Non-Fiction Next Issue's Theme: Introduction to the Yellow Mythos Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane DJ Tyrer 6 Tease us with ambiguity... The Case of Charles Dexter Ward... John A. DeLaughter 28 https://tigersharkpublishing.wordpress.com/ Review [email protected] Neil K. Henderson 49 Poetry due to bad weather Haiku halloween cancelled monsters in limbo Denny E. Marshall 2 Castles halloween warning Wayne Russell 4 vamps, aliens, and monsters Children in the Sky in shadows lurking Michael Lee Johnson 4 Fantasia evil doctors house visit on Halloween eve DS Davidson 4 real monsters for rent Fade Into The Future By Denny E. Marshall DJ Tyrer 8 The Screams of the Solar Eclipses Artwork Mark Hudson 25 Michael Lee Johnson The Eye in the Darkness Children in the Sky 4 DS Davidson 27 Kevin Morley Tomes of Yore Into the Unknown 19 Aeronwy Dafies 27 Ayd Instone I edit my life The Wall 43 Michael Lee Johnson 49 Wayne Russell Wild Hunt Abandoned Asylum 13 Aeronwy Dafies 49 Escape 24 Don’t Put That Egg On Toast Neil K. Henderson 52 Lime Stone House 27 This Cold Realm Dead Vines 28 Wayne Russell 52 Dark Lines 41 They Didn’t Start as Snakes Corridors 54 Lana Highfill 53 Cover and additional internal art courtesy of Pixabay.com, except the illustration for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which was supplied by the author. Mugger By Denny E. Marshall As Jacob walks home a mugger attacks him. Jake defends himself. The assailant pulls out a knife and stabs Jake a few times then runs off. Jake struggles in pain as he seeks help and finds the first house he can. He staggers up the steps and rings the doorbell. A young couple opens the door. They see Jake covered in blood in movements of pain and agony. They throw him some candy and shut the door. Jake tries to crawl towards the next house, but is to weak to move. Jake dies slowly on the steps Halloween kills Jake. Castles Children in the Sky By Wayne Russell By Michael Lee Johnson Castles forged in snow white sands, There is a full moon, battle weary soldiers in simple form, distant in this sky tonight, scuttle along, encased in drab armour. Gray planets planted Damsels trapped, captive within the on an aging white, face. clouds of snowy rapture, weeping; while an unfathomable liquid beauty Children, living and dead, storms what was once some calm love the moon with small hearts. walled existence. Those in heaven already take gold thread, Awake, drop the moon down for us all to see. the voices whispered at blood Those alive with us, look out their lotus dawn, bedroom windows tonight, we smile, then prayers, then sleep. this dream has now ended. Fantasia By DS Davidson Unlimited truth A fiction through a child’s eyes Form without meaning An elevated desire Fantasia given birth Visions of the End By J.H. Hook In all my years I’ve never known a nightmare to last so long, paint pictures so vivid, and haunt my waking hours as this one has. In describing these, at this point, nightly manifestations of horror, words can only go so far. I will try my best regardless, as challenging as it may be to my meagre skills. I stand in ashes heaped almost as high as my ankle, breathing in the man-made mist. The air itself feels caustic, leaving an itch on my skin the like of which could become a burn at any moment without warning. The lamenting cries of great beasts echo through the fractured cityscapes of this future. Then it comes. From a black hole, it crawls. Life seeps out from the void where nothing should live, if such a thing can be considered alive as we know it. The ashes raise, part, and swirl on down abandoned streets. Travelling on warm, infernal winds, rats fleeing a ship they instinctually know to be lost. Its very proximity causes a gnawing agony through my bones and the sight of it twisting through the bloody skies is enough to break the minds of millions. Monolithic claws burst copper-tinged clouds with every swing and a primordial roar shakes the foundations of humanity. A billowing mass of black flame makes the body, an unholy furnace the mouth. Its appearance alone is harrowing to the core but the true horror, that which robs me of sleep and buzzes in the back of my mind, is nestled in the things stomach. A glorious, monstrous eye, bloodshot and weeping, it’s gaze raking the ground. That eye... It knows me. Knows every lie, every scrap of deceit, everything I’ve ever regretted in my life, it knows. I flee from the behemoth, finding whatever hiding place is left among the industrial skeletons. It’s ultimately in vain, of course. Nobody runs faster than it eats. Huddled in the debris, the itching sensation grows and crawls across my body. The very presence of the earth-rending being exacerbates the unwelcome atmosphere and makes my brain feel swollen to the point of bursting. That is how I wake every morning, sweat-drenched and foetal, thoughts still trapped somewhere between the welcome relief of reality and that doomed realm. That realm that at first seemed so impossible but seems more plausible every time my tortured and torturous subconscious is dragged back inside it, to witness its final moments. Don’t ask me how I know it, it follows with the dream-logic that such phantasms operate on, but I am certain that if that blasphemous eye were ever to turn its final gaze on me I would simply die. I would be found in the coming days or weeks, tangled in my bed-sheets, hands curled into frozen claws of desperation. And the most haunting thing of all? With every reiteration of the dream that eye draws inexorably closer. A few steps closer to my hiding place every night. It’s languid, almost toying. Why shouldn’t it be? It has all the time in the world. The End An Introduction to the Yellow Mythos By DJ Tyrer Even seeking to name this collection of loosely-interlinked stories and poems is fraught. Is it a subset of the Cthulhu Mythos? Is it the Hastur Mythos? (Confusingly, that was Derleth’s preferred term for the broader Cthulhu Mythos.) Is it the Carcosa Mythos? Or, is it the Yellow Mythos? Maybe we’re fooling ourselves into thinking it can be classified easily, if at all. Certainly, Bierce didn’t envisage Chambers borrowing names from a couple of seemingly-unlinked stories, and neither of them foresaw Lovecraft co-opting Chambers’ fiction into his, let alone the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that followed (further confused, for example, by references to Chambers’ work by authors unaware that Lovecraft and his successors had melded them into something quite different). Although it was Ambrose Bierce who sowed the seeds of the Mythos, it was RW Chambers who adapted them into the form best known today, introducing The King In Yellow (play and entity) in his collection of the same name. As Lovecraft would later do, Chambers made use of nebulous yet recurring names and imagery to hint at an unknowable, hidden horror. Indeed, his touch is so light that he leaves almost everything about the dread play, the world it describes and the horrors it unleashes to the imagination of the reader. Indeed, almost everything most people ‘know’ about the King, Hastur, Carcosa and the play is derived from later interpretations, many contradictory. This lack of cohesion, or truth, both in reality and in the fiction, is at the very heart of the Mythos. Within the fiction, the truth is always just out of grasp and even the slightest flicker of understanding brings madness not enlightenment, unless the two are the same thing. In reality, neither Lovecraft, Chambers nor Bierce established a definitive ‘truth’ for their successors to work with, and any subsequent who have attempted to do so have been in conflict with other writers pursuing their own, sometimes self-contradictory, interpretation. There is no definitive ‘canon’ of stories – each Mythos has its own slightly-different slant – and there doubtless have been readers aware of Hastur through the writings of Lovecraft and Derleth who never read a word of Chambers and Bierce, whilst there are definitely those who have embraced Chambers’ corpus without being aware of anything that came after. Those interested in learning more about the myriad different interpretations of the Mythos are directed to the Yellow Site, an ever-growing wiki of Yellow-tainted information.